Hell Hath No Fury (12 page)

In the summer of 1870, France stumbled into a war with Prussia in which the French army suffered a rapid succession of humiliating defeats. At the beginning of September the 120,000-strong Army of Chalon was forced by the Prussian Third Army to capitulate at Sedan, and in Paris the Second Empire was replaced by the Government of National Defense. In March the French capital fell to the Prussians after a long siege. During the siege, Michel had become a member of the Committee of Vigilance for the Eighteenth District (Montmartre) and, under the influence of her lover, Théophile Ferré, had grown increasingly militant.

At the end of March 1871, with the Prussian army encamped outside Paris while the French government negotiated a humiliating peace treaty, a Paris mob went on the rampage, burning the palace of the Tuileries and the Hotel de Ville and torching the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Michel was everywhere, a baleful sight lit by flames, stalking the streets in a man's uniform and armed with a rifle and fixed bayonet. The Paris Commune, which was declared on March 28 amid the ruins of defeat, was inspired by France's revolutionary past, but its leaders lacked any coherent political program.

With the loyalty of the National Guard militia in Paris wavering, regular troops were dispatched to Paris from Versailles, where the government had taken refuge. A bombardment of the capital began on May 1 and at the end of the month the city was stormed, resulting in the loss of some 25,000 lives. Georges Clemenceau, a future French premier and then the mayor of Montmartre, said of the women of the Commune, “They fought like devils, far better than the men; I had the pain of seeing fifty of them shot down, even when they had been surrounded by troops and disarmed.”

Michel had been in charge of the Commune's social and educational policies and had fought on the barricades. She had been one of the last defenders of the cemetery in Montmartre, the Communards' final redoubt, but escaped the debacle in Paris only to give herself up when she learned that her mother was being held as a hostage. The government, reluctant to confer instant martyrdom on her as they had with many Communards, including her lover Ferré, imprisoned Michel in Versailles and placed her on trial.

She appeared in court wearing black, a token of mourning for the thousands of Communards who had been summarily executed. Justifying her part in the burning of Paris, she declared, “I wanted to oppose the Versailles invaders with a barrier of flames…. Since it appears that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance. If you are not cowards, kill me.” The judiciary of the Third Republic refused to oblige and dispatched Michel to a penal colony in New Caledonia in the South Pacific, where she insisted that she receive the same treatment as male prisoners.

Imprisonment did not dull Michel's ardor, and on her return to France after the amnesty of 1881 she resumed her career as radical agitator, with the police in constant attendance. A six-year jail sentence, for inciting a mob to break into bakeries during a food riot, failed to silence her. In 1890, shortly after her release from prison, she led strikes in the district of Vienne and survived an assassination attempt in which she was shot in the head by a Breton.

This did nothing to calm her increasing turbulence. Plans were now afoot to certify Michel as insane, and she fled to London, where she befriended the young painter Augustus John, wrote about the Paris Commune, raised funds for revolutionary groups in Europe, and met the American revolutionary and anarchist Emma Goldman (“Red Emma”). In 1896 she returned to France and, still working at a frantic pace for the revolution, died on a trip to Marseilles. Of the Communards, the painter Auguste Renoir said, “They were madmen, but they had a flame within them that will not die!”

Reference: Bullitt Lowry and Elizabeth Ellington Gunter, eds.,
Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel,
1981.

RED VIRGIN,
SEE
MICHEL, LOUISE,
Chapter 3.

SAMPSON, DEBORAH

American Soldier, b. 1760, d. 1827

A soldier of the American Revolution, Sampson was wounded several times, met George Washington, and in 1792 was awarded the sum of thirty-four pounds by the Massachusetts General Court for service in the Continental Army where she “did actually perform the duty of a soldier…and exhibited an extraordinary instance of female heroism, by discharging the duties of a faithful, gallant soldier, and at the same time preserving the virtue and chastity of her sex unsuspected and unblemished, and was discharged from the service with a fair and honorable character.”

Sampson was born in Plympton, Massachusetts, and was brought up in some hardship after her father abandoned his family and went to sea. On her mother's side, her ancestral line stretched back to William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, and her spirited grandmother, Bathsheba Bradford, regaled the young Deborah with tales of
Joan of Arc
(see Chapter 3). One of her father's cousins, Captain Simeon Sampson, had been held hostage during the French and Indian Wars, and had escaped by dressing as a woman. The captain, however, laughingly rejected the four-year-old Deborah's pleas to allow her to be his cabin boy.

Between the ages of ten and eighteen Sampson worked as an indentured servant, and the hard labor toughened her physically. In her teens she became an expert shot, hunting with her employer's sons, and later worked as a teacher in a public school. After the American War of Independence broke out in April 1775, Sampson enlisted. She signed up for three years in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment of the Continental Army as “Robert Shirtleff” (the name of her mother's son, Robert Shirtleff Sampson, who had died at the age of eight).

Firm-jawed, physically robust, and five feet seven inches tall, she passed for a man, binding her breasts to approximate a male physique. Over the next eighteen months she took part in several battles and was wounded at least three times, tending herself to avoid detection. However, Sampson's sex was discovered in 1783 when, after developing a fever, she was examined in a Philadelphia hospital. The physician said nothing, but when Sampson had recovered, he arranged with her commanding officer that she should deliver a letter in person to George Washington. With some tact, Washington discharged Sampson from the Continental Army, which she left in October 1783. A year later she married Benjamin Gannett, with whom she had three children.

Sampson resumed her career as a teacher and later, dressed in military regalia, embarked on lecture tours of New England and New York State, talking about her experiences in the War of Independence. A somewhat fanciful biography of Sampson, written by Herbert Mann, was published in 1786. From 1804, after an intercession by Paul Revere, Sampson received a pension of four dollars a month and a land grant from the US Congress in acknowledgment of her service as a Revolutionary soldier.

Reference: Lucy Freeman and Alma Bond,
America's First Woman Warrior: The Courage of Deborah Sampson,
1992.

SANDES, FLORA

World War I Nurse and Soldier, b. 1876, d. 1956

The daughter of a Suffolk clergyman, Sandes worked as a secretary in London before 1914 and received elementary medical training in the
First Aid Nursing Yeomanry
(FANY, see Chapter 6) and the St. John's Ambulance Brigade. In August 1914, along with thirty-six other nurses, she sailed from London, bound for Serbia, then at war with Austria-Hungary.

Initially attached to the Serbian Red Cross and then to the Second Infantry Regiment, she soon exchanged a nurse's uniform for the khaki and puttees of a front-line soldier in a war in which the Serbs were now fighting Austro-German forces and their Bulgarian ally. In November 1915, Sandes, now enlisted in the Serbian army, joined the “Great Retreat” across the mountains of Albania to the island of Corfu in the Adriatic.

Buxom, open-faced, and immensely tough, Sandes relished the military life and was idolized by her Serbian comrades. She quickly adapted to trench warfare, explaining that she derived particular satisfaction from the fighting in which the explosion of her grenades was followed by “a few groans, then silence,” since a “tremendous hullabaloo” indicated that she had inflicted “only a few scratches, or the top of someone's finger…taken off.” Like
Nadezhda Durova
(see Chapter 3) she always insisted that her wartime experience—with its mixture of discomfort and boredom, interspersed with moments of terrible savagery—gave her a freedom that had been previously unimaginable for a woman.

In 1916 she was badly wounded in hand-to-hand fighting and reluctantly returned to nursing and, briefly, to England. She noted that it was like “losing everything at one fell swoop and trying to find bearings again in another life and in an entirely different world.”

At the end of World War I, Sandes decided to throw in her lot with the Serbian army. In June 1919, the Serbian parliament passed legislation enabling her to become the first woman to be commissioned in the Serbian army. She rose to the rank of captain and retired with her adopted country's highest decoration, the King George Star. In 1927 she married Russian émigré Yurie Yudenich and lived in France and Belgrade, where she was interned by the Germans during World War II. Her husband died in 1941, and at the end of the war Sandes returned to Suffolk, where her remarkable journey had begun.

Reference: Alan Burgess,
The Lovely Sergeant,
1963.

STUART, MIRANDA,
SEE
BARRY, JAMES, Chapter 3.

VELAZQUEZ, LORETA JANETA

Civil War Soldier of the Confederacy, b. 1842, d. 1897?

The Cuban-born widow of a Confederate soldier who died of accidental gunshot wounds, Loreta Janeta Velazquez also lost her three children to a fever and, utterly bereft, left her home in New Orleans with the intention of becoming “a second
Joan of Arc
” (see Chapter 3).

At her own expense, she raised and equipped an infantry unit in Arkansas, thus avoiding the risk of being recognized by any of her New Orleans acquaintances, and adopted the name of Harry T. Buford, donning a complicated metal corset to hide her curves and sporting a false mustache and roguish swagger.

As Buford, she commanded her Arkansas Grays at the First Battle of Bull Run (1861) and later campaigned in Kentucky and Tennessee, where she was badly wounded and cited for gallantry. However, her extraordinary demeanor led to her being arrested in Richmond, Virginia, as a suspected Union spy. According to her own account, Velazquez turned the situation to her advantage by convincing the Confederate authorities of her loyalty and persuading them to employ her as a secret agent. One of the exploits to which she laid claim was the theft of electrotype impressions of Union bond and note plates to enable the Confederates to make forgeries.

During the war, she married Captain De Caulp, a Scot serving in the Confederate Army, and lost her second husband when he was killed in action. Her third husband was Major Wesson, an explorer who had the misfortune to die of “the black vomit” at the start of an expedition the couple had launched into the jungles of Venezuela. Bereft again, Velazquez soon acquired a fourth husband, a gold prospector, with whom she met Brigham Young, finding the Mormon leader to be “a pleasant, genial gentleman, with an excellent fund of humour and a captivating style of conversation.”

Velazquez's story has long been treated with skepticism by historians of the period, and the facts behind many aspects of her colorful career remain unproven. But her war service, her courage, her misfortunes, and her gallantry are beyond dispute. In her memoirs, published in 1876, Velazquez observed, “Notwithstanding the fact that I was a woman, I was as good a soldier as any man around me, and as willing as any to fight valiantly and to the bitter end before yielding.”

Reference: David G. Martin,
The Vicksburg Campaign: April 1862–July 1863
(Great Campaigns), 1994.

4

REBELS AND REVOLUTIONARIES

Women Taking Up Arms for a Cause

In any revolution, the women are more revolutionary than the men.

—Fidel Castro

C
ASTRO'S PRONOUNCEMENT
holds true for generations of human history. While some women have always sought to join the male power establishment in times of war or social upheaval and to work their way up through its ranks, others were natural rebels. Their wars lay outside the system and inevitably outside any protection of law or chivalry that might otherwise have been afforded to their sex.

Women rebels are an unusual breed. Whether the revolution is against the monarchy, the church, the local despot, or the state, women in general tend to be more conservative and religious than men, as modern voting patterns and church attendance demonstrate, and therefore more inclined to protect the status quo. This may be because both as women and as mothers, they have more to lose than men by putting themselves outside the protection of society. This was particularly true in the past, when without contraceptives they could not control their fertility, and without access to jobs they could not readily support themselves.

What makes a woman choose the rocky road of rebellion? For some, it chose itself through griefs and afflictions too great to be borne. The devastation inflicted on
Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi
(see Chapter 4) left her no other avenue but armed reprisal, a fate she embraced, determined to return her injuries with interest.

But most revolutionary women were driven not by personal injury but by deep, burning conviction, their ideologies sharpened by years of debate with fellow revolutionaries in smoky back rooms. Often highly educated and intelligent, especially from the nineteenth century onward, they concerned themselves with the intellectual and cultural struggle as strongly as with the armed conflict. For them, the works of Marx and Mao were weapons as vital as any bomb or gun, and they were equally at home in the lecture room or on the attack.

And as with the runaways and roaring girls of chapter 3, revolutionary war offered unparalleled opportunities to female idealists, zealots, and true believers, as well as to the disaffected and dispossessed who were ready to die for their cause. The women of America were active as early as Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, when one woman acting as Bacon's lieutenant was the first to gather his followers together, riding up and down the back country as his personal emissary, while a second, Sarah Grendon, was personally exempted from the subsequent free pardon because she had been such a “great encourager and assister in the late horrid Rebellion.” Another Sarah, Mistress Drummond of Jamestown, showed the spirit that united them all when she responded to the governor's threats of death by snapping a stick in two under his nose, shouting, “I fear the power of England no more than a broken straw!”

A century later when the American Revolution broke out, American women were again well to the fore, both in active engagement and in the courage of independent thought that created it (see also
American Civil War,
Chapter 11). An eyewitness account of the first battle at Lexington in 1774 describes “at every house, women and children making cartridges, running bullets, making wallets, baking biscuits…and at the same time animating their husbands and sons to fight for their liberties, though not knowing whether they should see them again.” Some women were unable or unwilling to leave the fighting to their men. A number of accounts tell of women putting on uniform and arming themselves, forming military-style companies like the Russian women's Battalion of Death (see
Bochkareva, Maria
Chapter 4), and performing dauntless acts of “masculine valour” in times of crisis.

With the harsh struggles of colonial life and the early death rate of women everywhere in the seventeenth century, most of these American women would still have been young and therefore trapped in the eternal cycle of reproduction, always pregnant, newly delivered, or about to be pregnant again. As they also lived under the early Puritan leaders' fundamentalist Bible-based belief in women's sinfulness and inferiority, it is remarkable how much they were able to do, and how little they were held back either by physical weakness or notions of mental incapacity. The same is true of every revolt and rebellion in recorded history. No revolution has taken place without some female freedom fighters, and the harsher the struggle, the more women have flocked to the cause.

Many of them paid a terrible price. But the risk has never deterred the true revolutionary, whatever the cost. The Russian anti-tsarist
Vera Figner
was imprisoned for twenty years in the dreaded Schlüsselburg island fortress in the Neva River where, as she later bleakly recorded, “the clock of life stopped” (see Chapter 4). Alone in her cell, the Cuban
Haydée Santamaría
was confronted with her brother's eye—or in some accounts, both eyes and testicles—in an attempt to make her talk (see Chapter 4). Santamaría held out and survived, when many male revolutionaries did not. All the women revolutionaries knew what they could expect if they were caught. It proved no deterrent. Their courage, sacrifice, and in some cases dreadful deaths are discussed below.

Not all revolutionaries fought with weapons of war. Many
Vietnam Women Fighters
in the 1970s worked on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, wielding picks and shovels, heaving baskets of soil, and filling bomb craters by day so that trucks could roll by night (see Chapter 4). Although numbers of them were university students or graduates, they had to learn new skills to operate heavy machinery and raise rice yields as they replaced the men. In the same spirit, the women on the
Long March
(see Chapter 4) were ready to rise to every demand the revolution made on them.

Whatever their roles, most of the women revolutionaries who took up arms slipped back into obscurity afterward, welcoming the chance to live a quiet life. Those who could not found that revolution cast a long shadow down the years. For them, it became the demon lover who demands and expects total allegiance, ruling out any normal existence such as most women knew. For the sake of “the revolution,” they sacrificed a loving husband and a peaceful home, a brood of children and a regular path through life. For them the struggle became the path itself, the only way forward, their courage and conviction lighting every step until the end.

And when the end comes, for women the light goes out. Once the revolutionary war is over, just as with any war, women are expected to return meekly to the home and not to demand their share of the revolutionary spoils. All revolutions, all uprisings, all revolts, all demands for equality throughout history, have stopped short of sexual equality. So there is no revolution for women in any of these revolutions we describe.

Indeed, the oppression of women in traditional societies can even increase, as the new political masters strive to return the country to some false notion of “the way it was before” (see
FLN Bombers,
Chapter 4). Sidelined and often stigmatized as unfeminine, aggressive, and part of the past, the women of most modern revolutions are left to ponder the summary of the eighteenth-century British politician Edmund Burke: “Every revolution contains in it something of evil.”

BOCHKAREVA, MARIA

Russian Bolshevik Soldier, b. 1889, d. 1920

A self-styled “tigress” of World War I, Bochkareva had an appetite for combat that was not satisfied by fighting in the ranks of men. As Russia's soldiers faltered in the face of the German onslaught, Bochkareva created a formation composed entirely of women volunteers, initially some two thousand strong, under her command.

The twenty-eight-year-old Bochkareva had led a tumultuous life. Born in Tomsk in 1889, she was the daughter of a serf and in her teens had become a prostitute and the mistress of a succession of men. In 1914, after surviving an attempt on her life by her husband, she became an ultra-patriot, enlisting as a soldier, winning a chestful of medals, and rising to the rank of sergeant. Her bravery was extraordinary, and she was famous for rescuing wounded comrades in the face of enemy machine-gun fire.

In May 1917, a low point for Russia in World War I, Bochkareva persuaded Alexander Kerensky, head of Russia's newly installed provisional government, to agree to the formation of a women's battalion—the so-called Battalion of Death—a shock force with shaven heads that would challenge the prevailing mood of defeatism. In June 1917, at St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg, where the battalion's banners were blessed, Bochkareva made this emotional appeal: “Come with us in the name of your fallen heroes! Come with us to dry the tears and heal the wounds of Russia. Protect her with your lives. We women are turning into tigresses to protect our children from a shameful yoke—to protect the freedom of our country.”

Despite her own checkered past, Bochkareva set her standards of recruitment high. “Our mother [Russia] is perishing!” she declared. “I want help to save her. I want women whose hearts are pure crystal, whose souls are pure, whose impulses are lofty.” Fifteen hundred women enlisted that night, and another five hundred the following day. Styling herself “Yashka” (note the male nom de guerre), she welcomed them all. Bochkareva's vision and enthusiasm proved contagious, and similar units were organized all over Russia. The formation of the Battalion of Death was much applauded by the English feminist and suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, who was visiting Russia at the time and took the salute at the march-past.

Of the initial intake, several hundred members of the Battalion of Death—most of them peasants—were sent to the Kovno sector, in Lithuania, under the overall command of General Denikin, where they went into action supported by a male battalion. After three weeks of fighting, the Battalion of Death had suffered losses of 350 killed and 70 wounded, among the latter Bochkareva herself. In his memoirs, Denikin attested to the women's bravery but observed that they were “quite unfit to be soldiers” he claimed that they had to be locked up at night to prevent them from being raped by the men under his command.

Some two hundred members of the Battalion of Death continued to serve at the front, but their position was undermined by Bochkareva's autocratic style of command, so unpredictable and tyrannical that she drove her remaining supporters away. The battalion also incurred the hostility of the Bolsheviks, who in October 1917 had swept away Kerensky's government. On November 21, 1917, the Bolshevik Revolutionary Committee disbanded Bochkareva's formation; subsequently it sentenced her to death. In 1918 she escaped to the United States via Vladivostok, disguised as a nurse, and dictated a colorful but unreliable book about her wartime experiences.

Bochkareva was subsequently introduced to President Woodrow Wilson and unsuccessfully attempted to persuade him to step up aid to the Russian White counterrevolutionaries, among whom her former commander Denikin was a leading figure. Then she turned up in England, where she unavailingly petitioned George V with a similar message. Undaunted, she was back in Archangel, the port on Russia's White Sea, in the autumn of 1918, attempting to raise another Battalion of Death to fight the Bolsheviks. She was sent packing by the commander of the British Expeditionary Force on the spot, General Ironside, who gave her five hundred rubles and a ticket back to Omsk, where she was arrested by the Bolsheviks and executed on May 16, 1920.

Reference: Maria Bochkareva and Isaac Don Levine,
Yashka: My Life as Peasant, Officer and Exile,
1919.

ERITREA, WOMEN COMBATANTS

Late Twentieth Century

The war in Eritrea brought a landmark decision in the history of women and combat during the 1970s, when the Eritrean military became the only one in the world to conscript women into active front-line combat service. As many as 30 percent of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Eritrea (EPLF) freedom fighters were women and girls.

In 1952 the former Italian colony of Eritrea, in the Horn of Africa, came under effective Ethiopian rule. After 1960, armed resistance in Eritrea grew when the region lost its autonomy and was reduced to the status of a province. To counter the guerrilla Eritrean movement, the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, was forced to reequip and modernize his army, a task made possible only by massive US aid. By the early 1970s, the United States was devoting more of its military aid budget to Ethiopia than to the rest of Africa combined.

After the overthrow of Haile Selassie by a military coup in 1974, Ethiopia's new leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam, turned to the Soviet Union for help in the war against the Eritrean separatists. However, in spite of an expanded and resupplied army and air force advised by some fifteen hundred Soviets and reinforced by a combat construction division of Cubans, the Ethiopian military government, the Derg, could make no headway in the war against Eritrea.